Grafana Monitoring Dashboards

Grafana is a multi-platform open source analytics and interactive visualization tool. It allows you to query, create dashboards, explore, and alert on metrics when connected to supported data sources. For various Operate First managed services and applications, we have created example Grafana dashboards which can be used to visualize our SLI/SLOs defined for each of the applications.

These monitoring dashboards are useful for visualizing the metrics (such as Prometheus metrics) collected from the applications to track and analyze the system's overall health. The dashboards can be altered, saved and reused as per your specific monitoring needs.

Dashboards can be represented by the GrafanaDashboard custom resource or by their raw JSON files. You can find example monitoring dashboards defined in separate JSON files for the various Operate First managed applications in this folder. For more information on how the Grafana dashboards are defined, please refer to this documentation.

Adding the Dashboards

The Operate First Grafana instance can be accessed here

To include additional Operate First monitoring dashboards to Grafana, you will need to:

1. Export the dashboard JSON file, either from the Grafana UI or from the HTTP API and save the JSON file in the dashboards folder
2. Create a GrafanaDashboard custom resource in our https://github.com/operate-first/apps repo by following the instructions mentioned in this documentation.

Using the Dashboards

Grafana dashboards can easily be exported and imported, either from the UI or from the HTTP API. Dashboards are exported in Grafana JSON format, and contain everything you need (layout, variables, styles, data sources, queries, etc) to import the dashboard at a later time.

You can import these dashboards in Grafana either by pasting the dashboard JSON text directly into the text area or directly uploading the JSON file. Make sure to add/connect your data sources to Grafana and pick what data source you want the dashboard to use.

For more details on importing/exporting dashboards, you can refer to the Grafana documentation here.